Buzz Blog

American Fiction ***1/2
See feature review. Available Jan. 12 in theaters. (R)

He Went That Way *1/2
I’m sure someone will make a case for this loosely-fact-based road drama being pure camp, but it was nearly impossible for me to get past how deeply misjudged this feels on nearly every level. Circa 1964, down-on-his-luck animal trainer Jim (Zachary Quinto)—who manages a celebrity performing chimpanzee named Spanky—picks up hitchhiker Bobby (Jacob Elordi) while taking Route 66 from California to Chicago, unaware that Bobby has been engaging in a little casual serial-killing. There’s a baseline weirdness to the proceedings as soon as it becomes obvious that Spanky is actually a human in a chimpanzee costume, yet somehow that performance is still more convincing than either of the two central humans. Quinto’s work codes Jim as a closeted gay man, which somehow overwhelms the notion of him as a sadsack with terrible judgment, and Elordi gets to whooping, hollering and casting crazy-eyed glances often enough that he might as well be wearing an “I’m a serial killer” T-shirt. Most baffling of all, writer Evan M. Wiener and the late director Jeff Darling (overseeing his first and final feature) keep pushing the notion that this is actually a mismatched buddy dramedy, punctuated by interludes of violence. No matter how much tragic backstory we get about Bobby’s traumatic childhood, it just feels creepy to turn a real-life murderer into a quirky dispenser of valuable life lessons. Available Jan. 12 via VOD. (R)

Lift **
The appeal of heist capers is enduring and understandable; we all love to see a likeable bunch of crooks give a bad guy his comeuppance. The trick comes in actually spending the time to make the crooks likeable. This confection casts as Kevin Hart as Cyrus, leader of a group of self-styled Robin Hood art thieves who are recruited-slash-blackmailed by INTERPOL agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to nab half $500 million in gold from a billionaire (Jean Reno) planning to launch a cyber-attack. It’s a nice touch in Daniel Kunka’s script that Cyrus makes sense as a leader not just because it’s asserted he is, but because he seems good at elevating and drawing the best from his team. But while that component of Cyrus’s personality is convincing, Hart isn’t nearly as effective as a suave romantic leading man, as a previous liaison between Abby and Cyrus is intended to raise the sexual-tension stakes (it does not). More disappointing, most of Cyrus’s crew are just interchangeable pieces, aside from Billy Magnusson’s nutty safecracker, leaving Hart too little in the way of character-based support. Director F. Gary Gray offers up some perfectly serviceable action beats, but speeding through the narrative doesn’t allow for much delight on the way to the “betcha didn’t see that coming” finale that’s meant to provide all the satisfaction. Available Jan. 12 via Netflix. (PG-13)

Monster ***
The dramas of Hirokazu Kore-eda aren’t always particularly subtle, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be effective, even when it takes a bit longer than it should to circle around the thematic point. This story opens with single mother Saori (Sakura Ando) worrying over the behavior of her 5th-grader son Minato (Soya Kurokawa), and beginning to suspect that it may be related to treatment by his teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama). But as the narrative changes perspective—backtracking to show us some of the same events from the point of view of Hori and Minato—it becomes evident that initial impressions might be misleading. What emerges might easily have been titled Rashomonster, as Kore-eda allows our sympathies to shift depending on whose version of events we’re seeing, and the chant of “who is the monster” by Minato and his classmate Yori (Hinata Hiiragi) becomes the clear thesis statement. The commentary on rushes to judgment and simplistic scapegoating comes off a bit didactic, but it’s elevated by the performances, particularly Ando’s work as the protective mom. And while there have been better and more restrained approaches to similar subject matter about complicated adolescent friendships (like last year’s stunning Close), it’s still heartbreaking as Monster builds to its climactic revelations about the consequences of making people feel like there’s no place for them in the world. Available Jan. 12-14 at Park City Film Series. (NR)

Self Reliance **1/2
The idea of a more comedic version of David Fincher’s The Game isn’t a bad one, but maybe it would have been a good idea to make it funnier, or to offer a different kind of insight. Jake Johnson wrote, directed and stars as Tommy Walcott, whose mundane life is shaken up when Andy Samberg (playing himself) pulls up in a limo and offers him a chance to be a contestant in a dark-web game show: You can win a million dollars trying to avoid being killed by assassins for 30 days, and you’re safe as long as you’re in close proximity to another person. That is, of course, a perfect set-up for someone with intimacy issues to learn some important lessons about the need for connections and the value of embracing life, especially once he hooks up with a fellow game participant (Anna Kendrick). The thing is, we get the gist of that idea pretty early on, which mostly leaves the question of how creative Johnson can be in offering twists on his scenario. And there aren’t nearly enough of them that make for solid comedy; it kind of peaks with Sandberg’s performance playing on his affable persona and reluctant association with such an icky concept. Come to think of it, I might have gotten more big laughs out of John Brancato and Michael Ferris’s script for The Game. Available Jan. 12 via Hulu. (R)